Weekend #25 of 2012 looks like another disappointment: a soft $150 million for the top 12 films, down 12% from last year’s comparable weekend and down 14% from the four-year average for the weekend.  Pixar’s Brave should open well, but the other two openers will struggle to find any audience and there certainly won’t be […]

  Ugliness abounds, unless your title is Argo. OPENINGS:  CLOUD ATLAS (Warners) will be the tallest tree in the weekend’s bonzai forest, but that’s small comfort for a movie that cost $100M (plus heavy marketing) and probably won’t make much more than $10M for the weekend, based on its $3.5M Friday.  This, sadly, is why […]

  OPENINGS:  As expected, BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER (Marvel/Disney) swamped the box office worldwide.  Its $180M US weekend was below Doctor Strange 2 ($187.4M) and the original Black Panther ($202M, on a Presidents Day weekend), but still the biggest opening Hollywood has seen in 6 months, reinforcing the MCU as the center of movie culture […]

> The weekend multiples this week are a little high for movies that skew to women like Something Borrowed, Jumping the Broom and Water for Elephants due to Mother’s Day, when many families treat mom to a flick. The Thor number looks a little less impressive when you compare it to mid-level comic book movies […]

> Despite all Universal‘s efforts to imprint audiences with the idea that THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT is some kind of quasi-sequel to Bridesmaids (it’s not), preliminary numbers at Deadline show the movie to be underperforming badly.  Its $3.7M Friday was only in 3rd place for the day, well below the $6M opening day the same creative […]

>Based on Friday and Saturday box office (and estimated Sunday numbers), The Lion King returned to theaters 17 years later — in 3D no less — and scored a solid #1 for the weekend.  Drive opened okay, while Straw Dogs and I Don’t Know How She Does It were very quiet arrivals.  Conatagion fell to […]

Updated worldwide box office chart for 2013 North American films.  The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug (Warner Brothers) and Frozen (Disney) are the top American performers overseas by far this past week.  Also, click here for a summary of worldwide performance by studio.

Based on Friday’s grosses, Weekend #20 of 2013 looks like $145 million for the top 12 films, somewhat above the same weekend last year but slightly below the four-year average for the weekend.  Star Trek Into Darkness opened at #1 for the weekend but is performing well below our expectations. Opening at 3,762 theaters Thursday, Star […]